Checking In
by boredsvunut
Summary: One detective checks in on another... hints at a JohnOlivia friendship.


(Disclaimer: Nothing you see in this belongs to me. Nada. It all belongs to a certain genius creator with the initials 'DW.' I just borrow this stuff now and then – who says torturing fictional characters isn't fun?)

(A/N: Shout-out to my friends the Munchkins. You guys are great. Ink Cat's responsible for giving this one a title. Which means I don't even own the title. Damn. :D)

Her eyes meet mine when she opens her apartment door. It took me ten minutes to get her this far. To get her to do something as simple as opening the door. She blinks at me, like she was expecting to see someone else. "John?" She tilts her head slightly, looking at me. "What're you doing here?"

I'm used to seeing a well-dressed woman who cares about how she looks, to a point. The woman standing in her doorway doesn't even resemble the one I know, in the least. In fact, she looks like shit. Her hair's a mess, falling into her face. Her eyes are red and lined by dark circles.

"I thought I'd check in," I answer. "You took long enough to answer the door."

"I was asleep," she murmurs, stepping back, and letting me inside her apartment. I've never been here. I've never seen the place she calls home. It's clean, for the amount of time she spends here.

I see the comforter and pillow in a tangled mess on the couch. But do I believe it for a second that she was sleeping? Nope. She might be able to put it past someone – I've seen her undercover work and know she's a good liar – but I can see through it.

No one sleeps after something like what we saw. I was working with her that day. What we walked into in that normal-looking house in a quiet Brooklyn neighborhood was like something out of a nightmare. The first thing we saw was a woman, lying across the living room floor, beaten to death. The ME informed us she was pregnant – far enough along for it to be obvious. Then it was upstairs. Into a bedroom that obviously belonged to a little girl, painted shades of pink. Still curled up in the bed, clutching a doll, you couldn't tell she was dead. The only thing that gave it away was the bullet wound in her temple.

We checked the whole house. Walked into a master bedroom, saw the photos of the woman and the little girl. Then into a nursery set up for the baby on the way. I could see Olivia losing it then. She tried not to let it show but something like that gets to anyone. There was one more room. A bedroom belonging to another little girl. When we checked the closet, we found her. Curled up there, terrified. She'd been in that closet for two days, too scared to move. When she heard what was happening, she hid. It probably saved her life.

It didn't take us long to find the sorry son of a bitch who turned that house into hell. He left prints all over the place. He was nothing more than an estranged ex-husband, on the wrong end of a custody battle. The baby the woman was carrying belonged to her fiance. She'd moved on with her life. And he couldn't deal with that. He's in a jail cell, waiting for his trial date, while his former in-laws bury their daughter, granddaughter and unborn grandchild and try to help the surviving granddaughter have as much of a normal life as she can.

There was a mandatory debriefing with a shrink, after that, for both of us. But it doesn't help. Shit like that sticks with you, no matter how many times you talk about it.

Olivia drops onto her couch, curling her legs up under her. Apparently, she's not going to protest my being here. She's just not going to say anything. "Why are you here? Cragen send you? Elliot?" She asks, after a few minutes, raking her fingers through her hair.

"No. But you know, is answering the phone really beyond you? You're scaring them. You haven't even called in once."

She shakes her head. "I don't want their pity, Munch. Just because of what I saw, they feel sorry for me. Why should they? It's just a part of the job. I signed on for this."

"You didn't know it was going to get to you like this," I answer, quietly. "I know you didn't. No one does."

"Don't shrink me. Don't even go there," she retorts.

"Olivia…" The last thing I want to do is pity her. Make her think that I feel sorry for her. She hates that. "I was there, remember? I saw the same things you did. But you can't stay holed up in here for the rest of your life."

She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps herself in the comforter. She props her chin on her knees and looks at me. "When we found Haley in the closet…"

Haley. The seven-year-old who was the only person to come out of that house alive.

Olivia takes a breath and goes on, turning her gaze toward the wall instead of me. "For a minute there, when she looked at us, I flashed back to when I was her age."

I've always known her childhood wasn't the greatest. It wasn't something she likes to think about. But she's always quiet about it. She doesn't bring up any specific stories of things her mother put her through. Or at least she didn't.

"It was winter. Freezing outside. I was going to walk home from school, but a neighbor picked me up. I think she saw something. A bruise I had on my arm – my mother had grabbed me. She took me and her own kids upstairs, got me something to eat and made a phone call." She sighs, burrowing deeper into the comforter. "The next day, people from CPS were in the apartment when I came home. Mom was sober that day, for some reason. They talked to me – I wanted to tell them what was happening, but I couldn't. I didn't know what would happen."

A kid's fear of being separated from a parent. It always seems to interfere. Telling the truth would have gotten her out of that situation, but she didn't know what would happen to her if she did. To a seven-year-old, it's probably terrifying.

"The neighbor who'd picked me up called CPS," Olivia murmurs, rubbing her face. "Mom was angry. Even though I didn't do anything, she was angry. I knew better than to get in the way, so I stayed in my room. Hid in the closet. I don't know how long I stayed there. But I know it had to be a couple of days."

She shakes her head, abruptly. "I saw too much into that," she mutters, quietly. "Let it get to me."

"Like we all haven't done that?" I look at her, as I take a seat on her couch. "Think about it. Nobody just volunteers for this job, without something personal. It happens."

It's the kids. She can't stand to watch a child suffer. I don't think any sane, humane person can. But she was one of the kids who fell through the cracks in the system. Compared to the lives of some of the kids we see, her childhood sounds like a dream, but she was still one of them. She knows what it's like to be ignored. Neglected. Beaten around, when her mother felt like it.

Olivia closes her eyes and pinches the bridge of her nose. She sighs and looks back at me. "Headache," she murmurs, answering the question before I can ask it. "Maybe it's a sign that I'm thinking too much."

I look at her, sharply. "When's the last time you ate?"

She shrugs. "Yesterday morning – I don't have much of an appetite."

"C'mon. There's a place around the corner. For this neighborhood, the food's good."

"Munch, I look like shit, I haven't slept in a couple of days…" She begins to protest.

I knew she hadn't been sleeping. I could tell the second I looked at her. I did a little better than she did – I slept, but only for a couple of hours at a time. "I'm not even going to argue with you," I answer, earning a glare from exhausted eyes. "Go get a shower – do whatever the hell it is women do to clean up. I'll buy you dinner."

She looks at me sideways for a minute, almost as if she's debating whether or not to argue with me. She decides not to and gets up, shedding the comforter. "If I didn't know any better, I could've sworn you were trying to make this into a date," she murmurs, shaking her head.

"Maybe I am. Can you blame me?" I say to her retreating back.

Olivia turns and picks up the pillow resting in the chair closest to her. She throws it at me – I expected that. "A pillow? Is that the best you can do? The last time a woman threw something at me, it was one of her shoes."

She rolls her eyes at me. That's the one thing every woman can do well. I think they learn it in some secret class in high school. "You've had how many wives and you still can't figure out how not to piss a woman off?"

"I'm a slow learner," I answer back.

She shakes her head and turns her back, making her way down the hall, in answer.

I can't erase what we saw, for either of us, but she's joking with me. Acting a little more like herself. That's a definite improvement over the way she was when she answered the door.

Fifteen minutes later, she's out of the shower and dressed, looking a little more like how I'm used to seeing her. She's no longer a mess.

"John?" She questions, getting her coat from where it hangs.

"Yeah?"

"Thanks," she says, quietly.

"Hey – someone was going to check in on you, eventually. You couldn't hide forever."

She laughs, softly. "C'mon, old man. You said you were gonna buy me dinner."


End file.
